1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed toward the field of electronic procurement systems. More specifically, the technology described in this provisional patent application relates to a method and system for an e-catalog procurement assistant that combines artificial intelligence and evolving knowledge capture.
2. Description of the Related Art
A pending utility patent application (Knowledge-based e-catalog procurement system and method, U.S. Ser. No. 10/215,109) provides a solution to one of the fundamental problems of B2B Internet commerce, which is the ability to electronically shop a heterogeneous mix of vendors, or suppliers, whose catalog contents appear in a variety of formats, and further, the ability of an organization to capture and store the shopping patterns and choices of its buyers (shoppers), and to make this evolving knowledge available to the entire organization.
The present invention augments this approach with a real-time intelligent find-assistant that suggests useful search terms to a buyer, as they progress in their online journey to find a particular item for potential purchase.
Current technologies, such as used by Amazon, Google, and similar services, generate suggestions or recommendations based merely on recent previous viewing or purchase choices made by a buyer, or a group of buyers. That approach suffers from at least two disadvantages. First, no information is captured about a buyer's ‘chain of reasoning’ in their search. Thus, suggestions are made on the basis of only the final result. Second, suggestions are not made throughout the buyer's search, but only at the beginning.
In contrast, the present invention captures and stores buyers' entire history of choices, and uses this knowledge, in conjunction with an adaptive algorithm for selecting suggested search terms from candidate vendor catalog pages on the basis of relevance to the terms previously used by buyers, to make increasingly useful suggestions to a buyer as to what item descriptions to look for, as they progress through their search.